On 2nd of January, I had booked a flight from Mumbai to Bangalore BOM 15:30 to BLR 17.15) and with the intention of taking the same I reached the airport approx 2 hours early around 1.45 PM only to find out that the flight have been overbooked and since DGCA allows 10% overbooking, there is nothing the airlines can do. I was given an option to take another flight which was the same day but later. While I resisted considering that I had commitments in Bangalore at a particular time that evening which was not moveable, the airline staff was simply extremely rude and I felt like coming to a government office to get things done. They simply mentioned to me that DGCA allows this so they would do it and there is nothing I can do about it. Nobody even replied properly to my queries.
I resisted further and what happened next was truly shocking. When I kept asking further questions, the lady in charge (Rupmani something, Junior Officer at BOM) threatened to call CRPF to shut me down. They overbook a flight and then when I am asking questions on why this has happened and how will I manage now etc, they wanted call CRPF on me? I thought post TATA taking over things would become better, but it felt worse than a govt office, right from the moment she called us to her desk which is apparently the senior staff desk to how it was informed to us and how nobody responded to our questions and the authority in which we were told to take the next flight was completely off. There was no empathy, no consideration, no apology - it was an order.
When I didn't give up, they removed 2 of the other passengers and this is where things get interesting. I heard them talking among themselves that let's send these guys on the next flight etc, that these 2 should be removalble but they were unable to remove etc. They finally removed 2 passengers and me and my wife got the tickets. I still didn't understand what was happening but when we boarded the flight, things started to fall into place.
Our adjacent seat was occupied by an Air India crew member (Air Hostess) who was flying to Bangalore. She would then host in another flight from Bangalore to some other loaction. This is what I understood from the situation, Air India was making 3 crew members travel from BOM to Bangalore due to operational in-efficiencies (It was new year - 2nd Jan - I think some of the members would have called in sick in Bangalore, hence they were transporting members from BOM) and removing paid customers like me from the flight using the DGCA 10% overbooking rule. So for internal employee movements of Air India, a paying customer would be delayed, a paying customer like me would miss a connecting flight, miss a meeting or won't reach home in time for their children.
I have already seen multiple news article on Air India being fined by the courts for similar behavior before but this malpractice has continued.(https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/air-india-fined-rs-10-lakh-by-dgca-for-denying-boarding-to-passengers-with-valid-tickets/article65526289.ece).
I have the entire thing on video as well and can be shared here. Would love suggestions from the community here on what should be done other than avoiding Air India which I suggest all of us should do. Also SpiceJet is already fucked up, Air India does Scam under the respected name of TATA now, options of airlines would get limited day by day this way.
What would the gravevine community suggest?